But I was heartened that summer, not discouraged. I had proved to myself that I could indeed grow, if not organic, at least pesticide-free apples. True, I’d had to resort to a manufactured fungicide to save the trees from the rust, so I’d lost my “organic” badge of honor, but at least I had avoided introducing to the orchard a manufactured pesticide that kills bees and butterflies and birds. And now, as fall stiffened into winter, the branches were swollen with buds and the promise of a full crop in the spring.
The winter that followed was a remarkably mild one in the Northeast. February temperatures soared into the eighties as daffodils bloomed. By March, an entire month early, two of the trees were in full bloom, a merry explosion of pink and white popcorn. I could almost see the blossoms unfurl right before my eyes, as if watching a time-lapse nature movie. I had never seen such a lovely sight. I walked daily among the trees and marveled at the flowers, my flowers. Even if only half of them produced fruit, I would have bushels of apples. Bushels of Empire apples. Yep, both of the trees in bloom were Empires.
And that’s when it hit me. My focus moved to what wasn’t blooming—either of the antique trees. Still recovering from their brush with cedar-apple rust, they had few buds, and the ones they did have didn’t look as though they’d be opening anytime soon. In other words, I had nothing to cross-fertilize my Empire blossoms! But wait, Larry had planted McIntosh trees last year. I checked them out: no buds at all.
Something else was missing, too. Where were the bees? It was only March. Perhaps they were still asleep. Or was this a symptom of a larger problem? Bees have been in general decline over the past several years, a decline blamed on pesticide use and a destructive mite that has been depleting the population. Perhaps, like frogs, bees are a natural barometer of our environmental health. If so, stormy times are ahead. Whatever the reason, this year there was nary a bee in sight.
So, no complementary blossoms and no bees. Terrific. I was going to have to take matters into my own hands if I was going to have more than ornamental trees this year. The research institute where I work at my day job (which I will not be giving up for a farmer’s life anytime soon) is located on the grounds of a state psychiatric hospital built in the 1920s. Outside the former director’s mansion stand rows of old, stately apple trees. They make quite a sight, their weathered, contorted limbs spiraling up into spreading canopies. And in early March they, too, were in bloom. I didn’t know what variety they were, but given their age, they couldn’t possibly be Empire. So at lunch I tucked my necktie into my pants, went out with pruners and a plastic garbage bag, and snipped off dozens of blossom-laden twigs. Fortunately, no guards came by; just a couple of cars slowed as drivers peered over quizzically. “Just needs some pruning,” I shouted as I snipped.
At home I pinched off the pollen-bearing stamens into a mortar and ground them up with a pestle to release the pollen. Then, borrowing a small artist’s paintbrush from my daughter, I flitted from tree to tree, humming “Flight of the Bumblebee,” dipping the brush into the mortar, then deep into each blossom, doing Mother Nature’s work for her. Now I really felt like Mendel.
In the kitchen, which overlooks the orchard, Anne handled damage control.
“Why is Daddy painting the apple trees?” Katie wanted to know.
“He’s pollinating the trees, honey.”
“What does that mean?”
Zach passed through on his way to the refrigerator. “No birds-and-bees talk in front of me, okay?”
Birds and bees, indeed. By the time I was done, I felt strangely, strongly aroused. That night, the smell of pollen still fresh in my nostrils, I made passionate, urgent love to my mystified (but appreciative) wife.
Two weeks later, many of the blossoms had been replaced by tiny, embryonic apples. Dozens and dozens of them. It had worked! Victory was within my grasp. Time to lay on some Ferbam and start collecting plastic bags.
Well before the apples were ready for bags, when they were the size of cherries, it was clear that I had another problem. And as with the caterpillars the previous year, it seemingly happened overnight. Nearly every apple was dotted with black pockmarks. I pinched a few off and split them open with my fingernail. The black marks on the surface were the openings of black tunnels that wound through the interior of the apples. Something—most likely apple maggots—had infected nine out of every ten apples. I was sick. I slumped down on the lawn and tried to understand what I was doing wrong. This wasn’t like growing apples in the shadows of New York City. I was slowly starting to realize that Dad hadn’t had to deal with the various fungi, insects, and rusts that are prevalent wherever you find orchards and farms—and the Hudson Valley has plenty of both.
I went back to my books on integrated pest management. The underlying principle behind IPM is the avoidance of prophylactic, wide-spectrum spraying. “Wait until you have a problem, identify the pest, and then treat that specific pest,” goes the credo. With a touch of sadness, I sprayed the trees with the recommended chemical insecticide. Another step down the slippery slope: I was no longer organic, I was no longer even insecticide free. I was practicing IPM, at least, but in the end, IPM was, for me, a dismal failure. Perhaps because I wasn’t using indicator traps, perhaps because I didn’t have the time to spend on tree inspection, the insecticide came too late to save the infected fruit, which littered the ground in May. The dozens and dozens of blossoms that had held so much promise in March ended up yielding a handful of fruit—not even enough for a pie.
The flaw in IPM for the home orchardist, it seems to me, is that unless you have the luxury of being able to inspect your trees (or traps) every twelve hours, by the time you see a symptom or a pest, it is too late to treat it. Things happen quickly in the orchard, and pesticides applied to the outside of an apple do not reach the insect or eggs already inside. And now, having compromised my organic principles, in using both fungicide and insecticide on my trees, I didn’t even have any apples to show for it.
I discussed this with Anne. “We don’t practice medicine this way,” she said.
“Practice what way?”
“It seems like you’re waiting for the symptoms to appear before you treat the disease that you know is coming. Preventive medicine is much more effective. You need to prevent the disease from developing in the first place.”
“You don’t spray your patients with malathion.”
“No, but we give them vaccinations. And we prophylactically treat high-risk patients with medication or advise behavior changes to prevent the disease from getting a foothold.” She paused. “And your apples are high-risk patients.”
She had that right.
Over the winter, as new buds again swelled with the promise of fruit, I agonized over my next move. I had seen two potential bearing years of apples go to waste; the scorecard read “Pests 2, Me 0.” I needed a win.
One thing was certain: I was going to have to resort to at least some prophylactic spraying next year. But I wasn’t ready to throw in the organic towel yet. I picked up a can of “earth-friendly fruit-tree spray.” In addition to my favorite African chrysanthemum, it contained rotenone, another naturally occurring pesticide extracted from the stems and roots of a few tropical plants. But the mix consisted mainly of copper and sulfur—two elements found in nature, to be sure, but not ones I normally sprinkle on my food. I started applying it regularly in the spring, every two weeks.
We had a more conventional spring that year, the trees all bloomed in April at about the same time, when the bees were awake, and it became clear—again, before bagging time—that I had fungus and insect problems. That was enough. I had tried, I had really tried, but I was coming to the inescapable conclusion that chemical spraying was unavoidable if you wanted an edible apple crop—not a perfect apple, but just an edible apple. I would have been quite happy to harvest pockmarked apples that proudly brandished the “organic” label, but this was not one of the options. My only choices seemed to be no apples or nonorganic apples.
This was a painful conversation for me to have with myself. Not only was I still trying to live up to the exemplar of my father’s organic apple orchard, but I am a natural-fibers, NPR-supporting, recycling, compost-making, left-of-center environmentalist, and I put my money where my mouth is, supporting local groups like Scenic Hudson to clean our rivers and curb development. Yet I was an environmentalist with a problem: I wanted to grow apples.
So when the serpent offered me the pesticide-sprayed apple … I accepted it.
But the fall from innocence was not yet complete. That didn’t happen until, opening the bottle of Agway wide-spectrum orchard spray, I was startled by a distinctive, familiar smell. You know how a certain smell can, through some miracle of brain chemistry, transport you back to a place and time, awakening a lost memory? That’s what happened when I opened the orchard spray. But these madeleines transported me back to the pesticide of my youth! I knew that smell! Damn it, I grew up with that smell! Could it be? Could I have so romanticized my father’s “organic” apple raising that I had wiped out any conscious memory of pesticides? Or had he perhaps sneaked in a little malathion now and then when I wasn’t looking?
I was at once shocked, confused, and disillusioned. And most of all, no longer innocent. I had been chasing an ideal that didn’t even exist. The shackles gone, I started to laugh, in relief perhaps, but mainly at the joke. I don’t think I had ever before laughed while working on the apple trees. It had been mostly worry and disappointment. But we laughed that day, Dad and I, for a long time, in the basement, mixing orchard spray. Because in the Northeast, you see, there’s no such thing as organic apples.
You May Be Smarter, But He’s Got More Time
DEER DIES AFTER CROSSING MANHATTAN ROADWAY
A deer that had apparently been wandering around
Washington Heights in Manhattan died yesterday
after being struck as it crossed morning traffic along
the Henry Hudson Parkway, the police said.
—The New York Times
ELECTRONIC SINGING FISH DRIVES DEER FROM GARDEN
Dear Heloise,
After trying many chemical potions to scare deer
away—with lukewarm success—I hit on the idea to
use one of those motion-activated singing fish to
scare the critters away … It works great for me
and requires virtually no attention after mounting on
a stake in your garden.
—Hints from Heloise
The din of Big Machinery had long faded to the two-note song of chickadees, but the kitchen garden was not yet complete: it needed a fence. A very effective fence. I faced this task reluctantly. The garden looked so beautiful in its present (defenseless) condition, sitting just beyond an old stone wall, that I didn’t want a fence to spoil the pleasure of viewing it. I also wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable and interminable battle to come, a defensive battle, no less. The worst kind. Every good man would prefer offense to defense. I am speaking, of course, of the age-old war of man (and his garden) versus beast.
Never in the history of the North American continent has the deck been more stacked in favor of the beasts. Here in the Northeast, as in many parts of the country, herds of deer roam through neighborhoods unmolested while the kids who used to roam through the neighborhood now sail through cyberspace. Groundhogs build underground networks that put the New York subway system to shame. And just when you’ve finally secured the perimeter, birds swoop down from the skies.
Before discussing the sometimes grisly details of this battle, I should point out, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I have historically had a poor rapport with animals, all animals: domesticated, wild, just about any kind but grilled.
I attribute this to having spent my formative years in suburban New York (emphasis on the urban), where, surprisingly, no one in my neighborhood had any pets (unlessyou count little Debbie Sparhuber, who, for the briefest of times, had a salamander—or perhaps it was a newt—in a mayonnaise jar). During my entire childhood, the only mammals we ever saw in the neighborhood were stray dogs or an occasional raccoon, the latter being a nocturnal animal that you are not supposed to see during the day, unless, of course, it is rabid, a lesson that was constantly drummed into my malleable young head by parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, whose biggest fear, apparently, in moving from the relative security of Brooklyn (!) to the wild suburbs of Long Island was rabid animals. Consequently I emerged from my childhood having learned the lesson that animals not in a museum or on your plate were animals to be feared.
And the animals know it. Dogs take one look at me and growl. Cats pee. I have never been horseback riding without receiving a condescending scolding from the trail master—“Horses can smell fear”—as Trigger lurches off in the wrong direction.
We have had no better luck with pets, either. When Katie was eight, we bought her a dog and returned it after one of the most traumatic twenty-four hours of our lives. We eventually replaced the dog with a less demanding rabbit. He died in a month. Then we tried an aquarium, which is about as far down in the animal kingdom as you can get while still claiming to own a “pet.” Even that proved too much of a challenge. One day while cleaningthe tank, I accidentally turned the heater knob all the way to the right and literally cooked all the fish.
I felt a little more comfortable setting out to deal with animals in the garden, for the strategy there centered on keeping animals out of my life, not in it. And so far, keeping animals out of my life was something I’d rather excelled at.
As construction of our garden neared completion, I had to decide on what type of fencing we would put up. Not putting in fencing was never an option. Because of that lovely old stone wall that ran the length of the garden, I did not want to do anything to detract from its aesthetic. Yet the low wall itself did not pose enough of a barrier to do the job. We considered a four-foot fence built atop the stone wall (yuck) and a fence just inside the wall (better, but not much) and finally settled on using a few strands of electric wire, which is fairly inconspicuous, above the wall. A couple of wrought iron gates (insulated from the electricity) gave us access. I had at this point been using an electric fence more or less successfully to protect the orchard, so I already owned the expensive components (mainly the charger), which made this option especially attractive.
An electric fence is usually used to keep livestock in, but it can also be effective at keeping wildlife out. The high-quality models originate from either New Zealand (developed for the huge sheep-farming industry) orGermany (don’t ask). The American ones that Agway-type stores sell are reputed to be junk. The charger is basically a giant capacitor that builds up and discharges a six-thousand- to ten-thousand-volt charge about once a second. Because the amperage is low, and the duration brief, the shock is not harmful to humans or wildlife, but it does give a pretty good zing.
Ask our tree surgeon. A year after wiring the orchard, we contracted to have a large, diseased tree taken down about seventy-five feet from the fence.
I called Cory, the local tree surgeon, and started to give directions.
&n
bsp; “Not the Big Brown House!” he said. “I know the place.”
Naturally.
Cory lives up to his occupation’s odd title. He could drop a hundred-foot oak between the two yellow lines on a highway. Cory is impossible not to like, one of those tall, lean guys, all sinew and muscle, but the kind of muscle that comes from honest climbing and tree rassling, not the unnatural bulk and bulging biceps of a weight lifter. He has three assets that make him ideally suited to his job: First, he is somewhat shy and more comfortable a hundred feet up in a tree than talking with clients. In fact, his business card not-so-subtly proclaims (after “Over 18,000 dangerous trees taken down safely”), “Happiness is to be alone when we work.” Second, he can scamper up a tree like a monkey. No cherry picker for him, thank you. He straps on his crampons, and up he goes. Third, and most important, for our part of the country, he is one of those fortunate people with complete immunity to poison ivy. He can (and often does) wade through it all day long with no ill effect, whereas if I even see it, I start to itch.
So one Saturday, Cory arrived to tackle this huge white oak, hard as rock, a hundred feet tall and four feet across. To get a controlled fall in the right direction, he had set up a guy wire, a strong wire with a ratchet on one end, between the tree and his truck. Unfortunately the guy wire ran from the truck, through the orchard, passing directly on top of an electric wire, and then to the tree. Apparently Cory had not seen the yellow warning: electric fence sign sitting in my workshop, which I hadn’t quite gotten around to hanging yet. He started to ratchet up the wire, and zap! He fell back, shook his head with a “What the hell?” daze, and grabbed the ratchet again. Zap. “Jesus!” He then concluded that (1) he was receiving an electric shock, and (2) his truck’s electrical system was the source. Sometimes half-right is worse than not right at all. Determined to find the source, he hopped up to his pickup truck, which of course was now electrified to the tune of six thousand volts. Every second. Zap one thousand, zap one thousand, zap one thousand.
The $64 Tomato Page 8
